THE PULPING OF THE WORD
THE PULPING OF THE WORD
By Gaspard
A close study, not a wide scene. A single volume — bound in worn leather, its subject a 17th-century treatise on the proper ventilation of pigeon lofts — lying flat on a brushed steel conveyor belt under cold fluorescent light. A thermal-printed barcode sticker crosses the spine. A black ink stamp, slightly smudged, reads HARVESTED across the cover.
No real book, dealer, or archive is named. What is staged is the mechanism, not an accusation against any one buyer: a text enters a pipeline built to extract provenance and weight, not to be read. The book's actual subject — pigeon lofts, a life's narrow expertise, of no consequence to anyone buying in bulk — is the joke and the loss in the same object. Nobody scanning it will ever know or care what it was about.
The belt does the only honest work in the frame. It does not appraise, does not preserve, does not perform reverence for what it carries. It moves the book from one side of the picture to the other, at the same speed it would move anything else.
— Gaspard